“Father, we ask that you have mercy on our brother Wesley Morgan and lift up his wretched soul to live forever in your heavenly kingdom. Amen.”
Reverend Jason Stone touched the chest of the dead man in the casket in front of him and looked out at the small congregation.
Twenty men, all of them Morgan’s fellow railroad workers, shuffled in their straight wooden chairs. A few offered uncomfortable amens of their own.
Most of these rough-and-tumble hombres hadn’t set foot in a church for decades … at least until Reverend Stone arrived in town a couple months before.
Of course, the backroom of a saloon didn’t really count as a church, but Stone sermoned every Sunday at nine of the morning, come rain, shine, or hangover.
The men still weren’t sure what to make of Stone, but his presence gave them a certain comfort.
Watching him walk around town every day reading that tattered old Bible of his and taking notes while he prepared for his next oration made them feel an extra sort of protection.
And Stone’s timing was good, too.
Why, if he hadn’t come along when he did, all those men who had died in accidents -- Morgan was the eleventh -- would have been buried with no rites at all.
For his part, Reverend Stone was more than happy to help shuttle these poor souls to their destiny.
After all, these were the same men who stole his family’s land in Kansas, all in the name of progress.
As the pallbearers closed the coffin lid, Stone smiled and marked Morgan’s name off the list he kept there in the middle of his bible.
Halfway through the alphabet now, with much progress behind him and plenty still left to do.
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